Embodiments herein generally relate to the printing and verification of legal and financial documents including checks, negotiable instruments, etc. Many standards have been established for such documents. One such standard is Standard X9.27 entitled “Print Specifications for Magnetic Ink Character Recognition” and referred to as “MICR”. This standard is issued by the Accredited Standards Committee on Financial Services under the procedures of the American National Standards Institute and Published by the X9 Secretariat of the American Bankers Association. The specification sets forth the specific type fonts and special toners that must be used in the printing of these documents. Specification X9.13 entitled “American National Specifications for Placement and Location of MICR Printing” imposes stringent requirements for the placement of the MICR characters on checks. This specification delineates the very precise positioning of the MICR print characters relative to the edges of the check form. The specification also prohibits magnetic printing other than MICR characters within the character recognition reading area. The reading area is defined as a “Clear Band (MICR) A Band 0.625 inch high, measured from the aligning edge of the document, parallel to that edge and extending the length of the document. It is reserved for imprinting of MICR characters.”
The American National Standard “SPECIFICATIONS FOR PLACEMENT AND LOCATION OF MICR PRINTING” ANSI/ABA X9.13-1990 (Revision of X9.13-1983) incorporated herein by reference, describes the four (4) special characters used to delimit the fields within the MICR line of a check. In addition the specification describes the fields and the number of characters per field. Reading from right to left across the MICR line the AMOUNT FIELD always contains ten digits bracketed by two Amount symbols. The Amount symbol may not be used in any other field. The AMOUNT FIELD is not a required field. Next is the required ON US field of up to 19 characters (spaces are allowed) located between the Routing Field and the Amount Field and usually contains the account number and may also contain a serial number and/or a transaction code. Next is the required ROUTING FIELD that contains 9 characters that are bracketed by two Transit Symbols. The last field is the AUXILIARY ON US Field (used usually for a check serial number).
U.S. Patent Application 2005/0074159, incorporated herein by reference, explains that MICR characters are generally printed on checks by commercial check printers, generally including bank routing, account identification and serial numberings. Banks can append this printed information with the monetary amount field. Historically, most MICR characters were printed by offset printing methods using magnetic ink. Today, laser or ion-deposition methods are increasingly being used, by both commercial printers and financial institutions, for writing MICR encoded information.
The MICR encoded information is usually decoded by detecting one of two different magnetic properties of the magnetizable ink: remanance and permeability. The remanance method involves sensing weak voltage signals while scanning MICR character shapes that have been previously magnetized. The second decoding method, also known as the DC-bias method, involves detecting the changes in permeability presented by the MICR character shapes as these character shapes are scanned by the detector. U.S. Patent Application 2005/0074159 provides one decoding technique that reads MICR signals at two different signal levels: at both high and low gain levels.